December 31, 2011 AT 11:49 am

THE ADAFRUIT X2 TIME BALL – OPEN SOURCE LED “DISCO” BALL AND NEW YEAR DEVICE! Powered by ARDUINO!

Why spend time in a crowded and cold times square when you can make your OWN Times Square LED ball? Perfect for new years eve, disco parties, weddings, raves, bar mitzvahs, or just a romantic night in. This DIY LED Disco Ball is made using Adafruit’s 12mm LED pixels, an Arduino and two 2.4GHz XBee’s (for wireless disco control!). The LED pattern is controlled by the open source graphics language, Processing so it works on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. The ball pattern is made of a dozen laser cut acrylic panels that are ziptied together and the hanging cord is also the power supply cable (HD video here).

We’ll have a full tutorial after the new year so stay tuned and get your leisure suit to the cleaners!

7 Comments

OK, that is awesome! But the real question is, are you going to carry the yellow plaid shirt and pants? I wear a medium shirt and 32 X 30 pants.. I can see the look on my wife’s face now..
But seriously, that thing is awesome! Nice work!

The real real question is who was in that suit, and has he or she got the moves to keep up with that thing. Is there an Adafruit employee/friend waiting to disco their way out of a closet full of 70s polyester fashion?

So I was able to see tonight’s show-n-tell ( haven’t been able to get in on the previous ones ) .

Video looked great. Question: I noticed the lack of chat ( text ). I understand that the show-n-tell session doesn’t need this feature. But, how are you going to be able to do the Ask an Engineer sessions? Is Google thinking of adding this in the future? Or are we gonna go old-school irc ‘simulcast’? Or just sticking with Ustream for these? Just wondering…